Miles Mason is a serious lawyer. I never expected a good technology idea to come from him.
You’ll understand my surprise when you realize that he’s also a CPA and that he wrote The Forensic Accounting Deskbook. I can barely read that title without falling asleep. He’s also written a great website on Tennessee Divorce. Thankfully, it’s more interesting stuff.
I mean, he’s a nice guy and all, but a tech idea? I didn’t see that coming.
How to Use Technology to Prep for Your First Meeting
But that’s what I got in a meeting with him recently. He was talking about how he prepares for his initial consultations. He practices family law in Memphis and does gobs of consults with business owners, doctors, lawyers, and others with complicated marital estates.
As you can imagine, Miles shows up for his meetings prepared. He walks in as fired up and ready to go as a CPA can get. He’s ready to go before the meeting even starts. He has done his research.
When people call and schedule their first meeting with Miles, his team starts getting ready immediately.
Here’s what they do:
- They routinely gather name and address info during the scheduling call. They need that information for conflicts checking and other administrative processes.
- They take the names of the parties and search for them on LinkedIn. Hopefully, they get a hit. If so, they gather what they find.
- They then do a search on Zillow using the address provided by the caller. They gather that info.
- They attach the LinkedIn information to the data they collected during the call so Miles will have it handy during the meeting.
When Miles sits down with prospective clients, he already knows their work history and a bit about what their biggest asset might be. He has a feel for who they are and how they live. He’s way ahead of the curve. He learns all that without spending significant time on gathering the data, and he appears more competent, professional, and informed than other lawyers.
Other Tips on Using Tech to Your Advantage
As I talked with Miles, several things came up that might be useful to you.
First, they adjust their privacy settings on LinkedIn. They click on their own picture in the upper right-hand corner of the screen and click on “Privacy & Settings.” Then they click on “Select what others see when you view their profile” and set it at “You will be totally anonymous.” That way, prospective clients don’t become aware of the stalking.
Second, they do some rudimentary searching for the client on Google, Facebook, and Twitter. They don’t go hog wild with a social media check until after clients retain them, but they do a quick check to see whether there’s anything like a sex tape going viral. Worst case, they get to watch the sex tape (but I’m guessing a CPA would avert his eyes, right?).
Finally, they’ve figured out a way to automate the process and integrate it within their practice management system. They want to minimize the time spent on doing the searching, and this process screams out for automation, so they’ve done it.
Miles never walks into a room blind. He’s got more information before he walks in than many of us have after we’ve been in there for 30 minutes. Impressive.
Of course, I stole all of the ideas Miles mentioned. We’ve built the searching into the way we use Salesforce to manage our consultations. We found some prebuilt integrations for Salesforce that made it easy to incorporate Zillow. Most of the social media products are already integrated with Salesforce, making it simple to turn things on and start stalking.
While we’re all plugged in and aware of social media’s existence, it isn’t always easy to apply to our practices. It’s sometimes difficult to figure out how to make it relevant and useful to what we’re doing. Miles Mason has found a simple, easy, and perfect way to put the publicly available information to work in his practice.
